I finally managed to clean up my geotagging tools! Read more and download them here
Archive for the ‘gps’ Category
Geotagging Tools
Monday, September 10th, 2007Japan 2007
Monday, July 9th, 2007I finally got around to process all of my pictures and gps logs for my latest Japan trip. We visited Tokyo, Osaka, Himeji, Kyoto, Hiroshima and a small onsen resort up north called Ikaho – it was near Shibukawa station.
It was only 7 months since my first trip there but Japan was just as cool and fun as the first time!
Aperture Export Hell
Sunday, June 17th, 2007After checking out both Adobe’s LightRoom and Apple’s Aperture I decided to go for Aperture. They are both very cool programs but Aperture is just that little bit nicer..
That was until I found out about its jpg export bug! When you export jpgs from Aperture with metadata it actually produces corrupt jpg files! This means that I can’t use either exiv2 or ExifTool to geotag my images!!
Instead I had to first export my images without metadata and then export them again without. Then I run a script that copies all the metadata from the corrupt jpgs and applies them to the metadata-less ones. And THEN I can run my gps scripts! This is pure pain!
Apparently this bug is not just an Aperture one but a general OSX one – the Preview application also corrupts images if you add keywords to an image! Strangely enough the jpegs are fine if they have for example a GPS Exif tag already before you import it into Aperture or add keywords in Preview.
Apple needs to fix this.. now!
GPS Tracking Fun 2..
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
GPS Tracking Fun..
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007Last year I was on a 5 weeks vacation in New Zealand and Japan. Since I am a camera freak and take a lot of pictures I thought it would be fun to use geocoding to organize the thousands of pictures. So I bought a Garmin 60Cx GPS and had it record our movements at all times.
First of all I used the tracklog to geocode all the pictures using a Ruby script I wrote. Since we brought 4 cameras and we travelled between several time zones and even had daylight savings time during the trip, we didn’t really had the right time on all the cameras at all times. So some pictures needed time correction. After a lot of tedious work I finally got that fixed.
Then it was time to run the script! It worked fine except that the tool I use to actually add the gps info to the images can’t write to RAW-files! So only the jpgs have gps coords at the moment.
I also wanted to have a complete route on a map or some sorts. I thought about doing something with Google maps until I found GPSVisualizer. That does more or less everything I wanted and more.
GPSVisualizer also outputs KML files for Google Earth. I used gpsbabel to trim down the track log which was rather large. Auckland complete with a cruise around the harbour:
We had a helicopter ride around Mt. Cook and had a quick landing on top of the glacier! Here is the trip is all its 3D glory: 
Now I just need to process the GPS logs from my Japan trip…
